Another factor is the lack of the h sound in the Russian language;
there is no letter to represent this sound in the Cyrillic (Russian) alphabet.
Foreign words (such as Jewish names) containing the h sound were spelled
using either the hard g sound or gutteral kh sound instead.

Thus names like "Hirsh" and "Hinda" became "Girsh"
and "Ginda", or "Khersh" and "Khinda".
In some Lithuanian and Ukrainian regions, the initial h sound tended
to be dropped entirely, so "Hirsh" became "Irsh", and
"Hinda" might appear as "Inda".